Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Environment to Assess Cycling Hazard Perception Skills

Safe cycling requires situational awareness to identify and perceive hazards in the environment react avoid dangerous situations. Concurrently, tending external distractions leads a failure or respond appropriately time-constrained manner. Hazard perception training can enhance ability potential dangers while cycling. Although on road presence of driving cars provides an excellent opportunity develop evaluate hazard skills, there are obvious ethical practical risks, requiring extensive resources facilitate safety, particularly when involving children. Therefore, we developed Cycling Perception virtual reality (VR) simulator (CHP-VR simulator) create safe where be evaluated and/or trained real-time setting. The player interacts through stationary bike, sensors bike transfer player’s position actions (speed positioning) into environment. A VR headset real-world experience for player, procedural content generation (PCG) algorithm enables playable artifacts. Pilot data using experienced adult cyclists was collected measuring gaze behavior, both situ. comparable scene (cycling past parked bus) situ used. In this scenario, fixated 20% longer at bus compared However, limited agreement identified that mean differences fell within 95% confidence intervals. observed were likely attributed lower number concurrently appearing elements (i.e., cars) with Future work will explore feasibility testing young children by increasing assets incorporating game scoring system direct attention overt covert hazards.